Ferroro rocher

Just in case some of you were thinking, "Begods and begorrah, but that's a glorious blue sunny St. Patrick's Day they enjoyed there in Baile an Mhuroran", we woke up to this on the following morning.

That same blizzard bound evening, risking life and limb for the love of my country, I headed up to Sapporo to attend a reception held by the Irish Consulate in Hokkaido to mark the 17th. Yes, you read that correctly, there is now an Irish consulate in Hokkaido. Who isn't actually Irish, he's Japanese, but he's in charge of Glen Dimplex's Japanese operations, and Glen Dimplex sponsored our somewhat sporadic foray into Gaelic Football last summer. So there is a fair bit of grá for the man (and his wallet).
The Irish Ambassador and his wife also attended. I had a very nice chat with the latter but was too busy eating an intriguing oriental interpretation of Dublin Coddle to make the photo call with the former.
Also present was Frances Fitzgerald, the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs. According to her exceedingly modest website, she said that "I believe that my visit has helped to strengthen further the links between our two countries". She also acknowledged "the work the Irish community are doing to promote business and cultural links between Ireland and Japan". (As an aside, the report of her trip to Japan - which you can read here - has as one of its labels 'Newcastle Saggart Rathcoole'. An oblique shout out to your's truly?)
What she didn't acknowledge was a member of said Irish community pouring a glass of orange juice over her in a defiant political gesture at the prolonged suffering the country has had to endure.
Though to be honest, I didn't pour it so much as spill it, and it wasn't so much a defiant political gesture as me clumsily dropping my glass as I tried to get my mobile phone out to take a photograph.
But you know, yeah, chalk one up for the downtrodden. And those Garda whistle-blowers too.

One of these people smells of orange juice.

There aren't that many Irish resident actually in Hokkaido and the vast majority seem to live and work at the Paca Paca stud farm down in Hidaka (from whence came the 2012 Japanese Derby winner, Deep Brillante, but I haven't told Sanae. Nor am I going to.) It would seem that I am the longest Irish resident in Hokkaido to the power of four but I tried to keep that fact to myself. The vast majority of attendees were late middle-aged besuited Japanese businessmen who seemed to be having some serious trouble pronouncing the Minister's name. That 'tzg' combination in the middle of her surname just killed them.
It was an enjoyable albeit all too brief evening. The last train back to Muroran left at 8:30 so I had to make my apologies and leave early with vague political promises about dry cleaning and sending me the bill.

"Intriguing"

St. Patrick's Day

As befits the denizens of Teach Takahashi-Gaynor we flew the flag on the 17th, organized Muroran's parade (participants: Cian and a Unionist snow shovel; route: around the house), and ate a shepherd's pie that would leave the cooks at Avoca weeping with envy.
Nobody got drunk, nor started any fights though Cian and myself did have a bit of an argument about who would eat the last slice of the pie.

French break Irish hearts

Was the first thought that popped into my mind when I woke up on Sunday morning.
Early in Sunday morning, some time before five.
I had planned to stay up and watch the match live but having spent Saturday out and about in some above freezing albeit still cold sunshine, I succumbed to sleep all too easily.
Sanae had made me promise to wait and watch the match with her, but at five in the morning with both my mind and heart and racing, I couldn't stay lying in bed.
The uncertainty and the need to know, for better or, as I feared, for worse, drove me out of the bed, and silently I padded up the stairs.
I had recorded the match. Now, the terrible temptation in doing this is to cheat, turn on the computer and know the result in seconds rather than two agonizing hours later.
However, I had done this last November when Ireland played the All-Blacks and I had expected them to be fed to the sheep the kiwis had brought with them (for player 'recreation' purposes. Allegedly). And then I saw the score, read the match report and cursed my facile impetuousness.
But against France, in Paris, for the Six Nations' Championship.
I'll be honest dear reader, I gave it some serious thought.
But instead, I plugged the headphones into the side of the TV (Cian was asleep in the next room), sat down, fast forwarded through the anthems and "peep"! - we're off.
2 minutes in and we're three points down.
14 minutes and we're six points down. This is not good. I pull the computer closer and open the screen.
22 minutes and we score a try, so I close the screen. Sexton, measuring his preparation in aeons, misses the conversion so I open the screen again.
And so it went for the first half and into the second as scores were exchanged and I lurched wildly from elation to despair. Wildly but silently as both Cian and Sanae were still asleep.
And thus we arrive with the score at 20-22 in Ireland's favour and 15 minutes to go.
15 long, epochally long, minutes that twisted my soul, shredded my nerves, hammered my heart and left me vowing to check the internet first from now on.
78 minutes and that big lumbering French lad takes the ball out right, passes it to Chouly who dives over the line.
Sob...
But wait, even through my anguished, gasping tears, I can see that the pass was forward. Yes, forward, as forward as Nicola S. was at my Debs night back in the autumn of '87. God, if the nuns at Colaiste Bride only knew what their pupils were capable of...
The referee Steve 'Look at me' Walsh goes to the TMO. The TMO appears to be myopic as he looks again and again at what is clearly a passe avant.
And still we wait.
The TMO is wearing glasses. I reckon he should go down to Specsavers and demand his money back as they have clearly done nothing for his vision.
And still we wait.
And as they replay the pass for the umpteenth time, I explode.
"For f**k's sake ref, how f**king far forward does the ball have to f**king be"!!!
Cian comes bolting out of his room, "What Daddy?!" and Sanae comes up the stairs, "Is there something wrong?"
By this stage I can't speak and flap vaguely at the screen where the score still reads 20-22 with 78 minutes on the clock. Cian sits down on my lap to either watch Ireland record a historic victory or his Daddy suffer a heart attack while Sanae goes off in search of a defibrillator.
But even Steve, pretty boy Steve has had enough of Mr. Magoo's squinting and dithering and finally declares it a forward pass.
I don't cheer so much as utter a strangled "Yeaarghhh".
2 minutes to go. Time seems to slow down and collapse upon itself akin to the dying Irish scrum. I'm sure we are going to give away a penalty and that will be the last thing I ever see as my heart gives out and I depart this cruel, cruel world...
But no, there is a choke tackle, a thing of magnificent beauty, of grace and splendour, what Yeat's, no doubt with Paul Connell and the Irish backrow in mind, called "Beautiful Lofty Things". And the ref blows the final whistle and all I can do is emit an exhausted whimper.
And then I go and lie down for a while.


  

A year in Dublin

For reasons I can't really articulate this video makes me so proud and yet also breaks my heart. Sometimes, it feels very, very far from here to home.
To all of those not at home this Paddy's Day weekend, Lá Fhéile Pádraig agaibh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV5QYfpKvEE

Japanese Only

This banner appeared in Saitama Stadium last Saturday in a J-League soccer match between the Urawa Reds and the visiting Sagan Tosu. The banner was hung over the entrance to the goal end section of the stadium where the die-hard Urawa fans gather. Although seen by security guards prior to the kick off, they did not remove until some three hours later after the game was over for fear of "causing a disturbance", i.e. they were scared that the fans would turn on them if they removed it.
Photographs of the sign appeared on Twitter and soon went viral both within Japan and overseas. At first the Urawa Reds obfuscated with the club's chairman stating that they were trying to determine if the banner was actually "discriminatory in intent". 
After a round of forehead slapping and a chorus of "well, duh!" from the media, he subsequently copped on to the fact that intent has nothing to do with it; if somebody (and plenty did) perceives the sign as discriminatory, then its discriminatory.
Further up the Japanese soccer hierarchy the reaction was more trenchant. The J-League ordered the Reds to play their March 23rd game behind closed doors, the first time this has ever happened in professional soccer here. As Urawa are the best supported club in Japan with an average home attendance of 37,000, that is a fairly large chunk of change they will have to give up. 
The club meanwhile has found and banned the 20 supporters who hung the banner. According to the NHK evening news they claimed they hung the banner because there were too many foreigners coming to support the team and thus crowding out the Japanese fans from their beloved goal end position.
So, discriminatory and little boy moronic. 
A welcome follow up to such idiocy was the reaction of the Yokohama Marinos' fans who held up the banner below during their Asian Champions Cup game with the Chinese side Guangzhou Evergrande last Wednesday. 

Three years on

 Today marks the third anniversary of the 東北地方太平洋沖地震 (Great East Japan Earthquake). We now know that:
* 15,884 people died that day and a further 2,633 are still officially listed as 'missing'.
* A further 3,048 people have died in the intervening three years from the effects of the disaster, through illness, post traumatic stress disorder, and suicide.
* 267,000 people are still living in so-called 'temporary evacuation housing'. 
* There have been no fatalities from the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
* Of the 245,000 children under the age of 18 from Fukushima who have been tested, 75 are suspected of having thyroid cancer.
* The usual rate of thyroid cancer in Japanese children aged between 10 and 14 is one in a million.
* In Japan prior to March 11th, 2011, the annual radiation exposure limit for a child was set at 1 millisievert.
* The current annual radiation exposure limit for a child is now 20 millisieverts. This is the same as for an adult.
* All of Japan's potentially operable 50 nuclear reactors are currently idle.
* Cost to date of maintaining the idle reactors: $12.3 billion.
* Amount of contaminated water held in storage tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear plant: 300,000 tonnes.
* Planned storage capacity: 800,000 tonnes.
* Amount of 'new' ground water contaminated with radioactivity everyday that then needs to be extracted and stored: 400 tonnes.
* Estimated length of time needed to decommission the plant: 40 years.

And the Oscar goes to...

 For close on a decade myself and the Master of the Goody restaurant (his real name is Toru Miyahara but everyone affectionately calls him 'Master') have had an annual wager on the Oscars. We limit our selection to six categories: actress, actor, supporting actress, supporting actor, director, and film. The wager is decided by whoever correctly predicts the most winners. The prize is a DVD of the winner's choice bought by the loser.
Master, like myself, is a big fan of the big screen but again, like myself, he rarely gets to visit the cinema (there are none in Hiroo and the one here in Muroran seems to screen nothing but children's anime). When I lived in Hiroo (and spiritually I still do) one of the week's highlights (to be honest, the only highlight after my weekly feed of curry and fired potatoes at the restaurant) was the 'Monday night at the movies' Master organized. He would push the tables to one side, arrange rows of chairs and high stools, set up his projector, hook it up to the sound system, brew the coffee and dim the lights. It wasn't a cinema, but it was wonderful nevertheless. There is a lot to be said for watching movies on a big screen (well, biggish) with an audience as opposed to sitting alone in front of your TV, or increasingly, your computer. The collective laughs, gasps, and sighs add so much to the experience of watching a film.
I miss those Monday nights.
Anyway, tomorrow should decide where both the golden statutes and the DVD are going (though we've had draws in the past). For what it is worth, here are our picks:

                                              Master                                         Me
Actress                             Cate Blanchett                            Amy Adams
Actor                               Matthew McConaughey                   same
Supporting Actress          Jennifer Lawrence                      Lupita Nyong'o
Supporting Actor             Jared Leto                                   Michael Fassbender
Director                           Alfonso Cuaron                                same
Picture                             12 years a slave                           Gravity